A day after he told conservative bloggers that “the scientific community owes us more in terms of a better description of explanation about what might lie beneath all of this,” the former Utah governor said he fully agrees with the scientific consensus and supports action to reverse global warming.

“Let me be very clear on this: there is no change,” he told reporters after his speech to the Republican Jewish Coalition. “I put my faith and trust in science. So you have 99 of 100 climate scientists who have come out and talked about climate change in certain terms, what is responsible for it. I tend to say this is a discussion that should not be in the political lane but should be in the scientific lane.”

“Is there a one percent that has a disagreement? There’s a one percent that has a disagreement,” he added. “Will those discussions continue, as they always do in the scientific community, to clear up those areas of ambiguity? I suspect so. But, as for me, I’m on the side of science on this one.”

On Tuesday, he said “there’s not information right now to formulate policies in terms of addressing it over all, primarily because it’s a global issue.”

On Wednesday, after a firestorm on blogs and in the media that described him as flip-flopping and pandering, he tried to explain that he was answering a question about whether there is a consensus among scientists.
“It was an additional comment about well, is there still an open question? I say: I know where I am…but there are others who clearly look at the one percent and see that there is more yet to be discussed and put forward,” Huntsman said.

The former ambassador to China argued Wednesday that there needs to be an international agreement on how to reduce emissions to that the U.S. does not hamper its own economy while other countries ignore the problem.

“When you have 99 out of 100 climate scientists, there’s enough there for us to say we have an established body of science. Now it would be a very good thing to coordinate that science with the other major emitters on the globe, recognizing that it is an international problem,” he said. “I don’t want to disadvantage this country during a time when we are weak economically and want to get back on our feet.”